R. Bakker - The Judging eye

But he's already speaking, and in a voice that slaps the remaining laughter from the scalpers' mouths. Even the nearing roar seems to falter. A Ward cups the spaces immediately before him, a lens of bluish light. A cerulean glare limns his white hair and wolf-skin cloak; he suddenly looks the Gnostic Wizard he is.

One of the Surillic Points goes dark, and an increment of grimness shadows everything. Kiampas cries for a torch. Numb to the fingertips, she wades through the mules, hands him the one she carries, then returns to fetch another, which she lights by touching to the centre-most torch on the wall. She turns in time to see the sergeant heave the torch down the aisle in front of the Wizard. It pockets the dark with a ring of stark gold…

She glimpses something crouch in and out of the blackness, something white and snarling and shiny-thin. She wraps her sword arm around the nearest mule's neck, hugs the beast tight. "Bastion," she calls him, without knowing the why or the where of the name. "Bastion…" She cares not who thinks her a fool!

The darkness itself seems to rasp and chip and clank and wheeze. Inhuman barks ring across the unseen ceilings.

She sees Cleric stride through the line to Achamian's right. His cloak cast away, he stands planked in silvery armour, plates skirted in impossibly fine chain, his greatsword swinging from his left hip. Ishroi, she thinks, recalling Achamian's word from earlier. The Nonman joins the smaller Wizard in his arcane chanting. Deep words well up out of the root of things, so indecipherable they seem to yank at her eyes.

Above her, the remaining Point fades like an errant thought, and the company is reduced to the roiling glitter of torchlight. The eternal dark of Cil-Aujas closes about them.

The glow of sorcery paints all their faces.

Mimara is already running to Kiampas when he calls her, the remaining torches hugged tight to her breast. One by one she lights them, tries to purse the tremor from her lips while he heaves them with athletic violence into the dark. They arc high enough to brush the vaults with fluttering visibility. Some fall and spark across vacant floor. Two roll to the brink of the shrouded horde, providing the merest of glimpses: swords of notched iron held dowsing low, wet eyes glittering, white limbs folding into the black. The last chips a graven visage, then twirls blue down into the hunched midst of them. She glimpses a clutch of white faces, Nonmen faces, only pinched into grotesque parodies of expression.

Canine shadows stamp the torch into oblivion.

She stumbles back to Bastion, pulls his head to her breast. The dull immovability of the beast heartens her for some reason, soothes the quaking from her limbs. She whispers in his ear, congratulates him for his idiot bravery. Before her stands Lord Kosoter, unmoved, unmoving, the knots of his caste-noble braid gleaming down the cleft of his splint-armoured back. The line of his Skin Eaters reaches out to either side, and over their shields, she glimpses fragments of Cleric and Achamian, little more than silhouettes against the curved planes of their Wards.

She feels the Chorae… pinpricks of nothingness fanning across the far dark.

The horns caw through the black. The underworld horde surges forward, overruns the torches and their pools of fallow light. She glimpses a tide of howling faces and septic swords and dog-ribbed torsos-

Living light glitters out to meet them.

The two magi shout into the gibbering thunder, the one high and human, the other low and booming. Blinding lines spoke the air, their precision too beautiful to be true. The aisles beneath the columns are writ with theorems and axioms, Quyan and Gnostic, and the frenzied onslaught breaks beneath them, collapses into slops and severings. Basalt planes burst. Blood gouts. Flame dazzles.

The two magi shout into the shrieking thunder… The nearest column crumbles at the ankle, at once implodes and topples, and the scalpers cry out in terror. Gravel and debris rain smoke across the Wards. The sorcerous lines hiss through rolling plumes of dust. They parse and measure the open expanses, dissect the heaving mass, Sranc packed as tight as worms, their Nonman faces screeching back, waving like festival palms, thrashing like dogs in the jaws of lions.

Another column collapses, and Mimara thinks she hears Achamian screaming, "Nooooo!" through the mountainous clacking. Cleric's maniacal laugh rides the clamour.

A stench rains across them. Sranc blood, she realizes. Burning.

She sees only fractions through and over the scalpers, lightning glimpses. Baying mobs. Brilliant geometries sawing. Heaped tangles of dead. She feels the first Chorae bearer before she sees it, the forward plummet of absence and anathema… Several in the line cry out.

"Not one knee cracks!" Sarl screams in blood-raw tones. "Do you hear me? Not one knee!"

The old Wizard scrambles back through the line, blunders into Kiampas. He's crying new Cants and Wards before he's even recovered his balance… " yioh mihiljoi cuhewa aijiru… "

"Bashrag!" a scalper cries. "Seju! Sweet Seju!"

Even as the word registers, she sees it, a shadow stamping through the smoking dead, towering over the seething rush, as high at the waist as men are at the shoulder.

"Not! One! Knee!"

The eyes have rules. They are bred to the order of things and mutiny when exposed to violations. At first she can only blink. Even though she has read innumerable descriptions of the obscenity, the meat of it overwhelms her faculties. Elephantine proportions. Cabbage skin. Amalgam limbs, three arms welded into one arm, three legs into one leg. Moles like cancers, ulcerous with hair. A back bent in a fetal hunch. Hands that flower with fingers.

The Bashrag charges the scalpers, its swiftness contradicting the trampling shamble that is its gait. The Men raise shouts and arms. A spear snaps against the hauberk of crude iron scales draping its midsection. Its axe falls with the force of siege-engines, cleaving shield and arm and chest before the momentum of the iron becomes the momentum of the man and the two slap into the floor. It bats aside the scalper to the right. It throws the dead man high in raising its axe, like soaked cloth from a hammer, leaps roaring toward the old Wizard. Achamian shrinks behind his useless Wards.

Mimara is already charging. Squirrel is out, a glittering arc that catches the abomination below the elbow. The steel cuts true. Bone cracks. Severed muscle snaps into knots beneath the hide. But only one of the limb's three spokes is undone.

The Bashrag wags its great head in a mucus-plucking roar. The vestigal faces across its cheeks grimace with their own musculature. The skulls bound to its hair make a wooden clatter. It turns to her, the lower lids of each eye drawn to the pink by the weeping sockets below. It bares its misbegotten teeth. There is a moment of animal recognition. The truth of predator and prey hangs like possibility in the air between them. It raises its axe to the popping of ill-joined bones, and it seems that here, in the moment of her death, all justice stands revealed…

Smoke blown from the bonfires of domination.

She cries out… Something more plea than prayer.

But Oxwora has barrelled out of nowhere, crashing shoulder against shield into the creature's gut, bearing it back and down. The Thunyeri grunts in human savagery, sets to with his axe, hacking and hewing. But a Sranc leaps upon his back, drives its blade into his neck. The giant scalper cries out and arches, lets slip the haft of his axe. He catches the thing in his free hand, lifts it squealing and choking-

Only to drop it, speared in the gut by another Sranc. He staggers to his knees, then miraculously heaves back to his feet. Blood spills from his lips like wine from a bowl, mats his flaxen beard. His eyes cloud, but his face still snarls in rage. He seizes the spear holder in a back-breaking embrace, topples upon it as though hugging a child.